smoothvince

Simple & beautiful. The wind-up mechanism is a great touch adding to the ethereal quality making the time spent to just sit in the grass seem all the more precious...
Really hope this gets printed. (Great use of placement too, btw)

Spiritgreen

Cool, let's address the technical side of this then. At first glance, the halftones look nicely defined and the 'heat map' kinda way the colors are generated means you don't have many problems with more than two inks fighting for the same space.

Couple of potential problems. The halftone lines of different colors seem to be aligned with each other, rather than interlocking:

Really each ink color in the halftone should lock into the next, more like this:

That ensures the printing process consists of nice continuous lines of ink.

There are also a few places where the colors crowd together that might cause printing problems.

Like here, where the white, yellow, orange and red are overlapping very tightly:

This is potentially a bigger problem that happens anywhere your FX filter has a sharp gradient - and I imagine it's more problematic in Fire & Ice because of the blues and oranges meeting halfway.

---

I guess it comes down to how easy it is for Woot to make neat, interlocking halftones from your Illustrator file. If they can do that, then it looks to me like Creature of Shadow and Flame at least could print well. Maybe someone more familiar with halftoning in Illustrator could help with that question.

tomspc

lyonscc

Spiritgreen wrote:I guess it comes down to how easy it is for Woot to make neat, interlocking halftones from your Illustrator file. If they can do that, then it looks to me like Creature of Shadow and Flame at least could print well. Maybe someone more familiar with halftoning in Illustrator could help with that question.

Wow... Thank you so much, and for taking the time to help me out!

I'm still very new to this, and every time I think I'm getting the hang of it, I realize that I've only really scratched the surface.

Spiritgreen

lyonscc wrote:Wow... Thank you so much, and for taking the time to help me out!

I'm still very new to this, and every time I think I'm getting the hang of it, I realize that I've only really scratched the surface.

Thank you!

No problem.

I'd suggest that when you make these kinds of complicated halftoned designs in future, you make the halftones yourself and submit a layered bitmap file (Photoshop, GIMP, etc.) instead of an AI. That way Woot can be sure it's feasible, and you'll get a better idea of what's printable yourself.

The rejections you've had may be more about the images you're applying your FX filters to - Woot is naturally very cautious about work made from photos or other stock clipart. So, why not link to an image of your original artwork, before FX, in the submission message or in a post on your derby entry.

If the rejectionator can be see your artistic process and has a clear and clean print file, then it should be much smoother sailing. ^__^

L3g3ndQ

i think the image is just too big... i personally don't like huge prints on my shirts so if it wer a quarter of the size or maybe half the size i think it would look better and i would vote on it but as it is now... not so much, even though i really want to

deborah11565

L3g3ndQ wrote:i think the image is just too big... i personally don't like huge prints on my shirts so if it wer a quarter of the size or maybe half the size i think it would look better and i would vote on it but as it is now... not so much, even though i really want to

orabbit

Thanks, Merseine and Deborah. Can anyone give me feedback as to what could be improved? I'm playing on the idea that Cthulhu comes to people in dreams, and that Big Bird has an "imaginary" friend. Is it clear that Big Bird is dreaming, or does he look dead? I'm not sure exactly how better to visually suggest dreaming. I could flesh out the rest of Big Bird, but I tried to keep it vague enough to avoid copyright issues. Thanks for any suggestions!

flattopfrank

orabbit

Sorry to come of as combative. As a screen printer, it's clear to me that this would be a challenging print. The main issue is that a lot of your spot colors are 15% and below and 85% and above. A 50% halftone would have positive and negative dots or lines of equal size. If using dots, it looks like a checkerboard. When you have really small dota or lines, they overexpose in the screen burning process due to something called light scatter and undercutting. This means that your smooth gradient from 100% to 0% will close up at about 10%, leaving you with a hard posterized edge. And when printing, the fluid nature of ink causes something called dot gain, which means that 85-90% and above will blob up to 100%. Since a lot of your image lives in the fringes, it probably won't print the way you think it will. It would have to be done with more ink colors, getting into the dreaded and misundestood world of "simulated process". Here's a great video series to learn what simulated process really means. There's a real art to color separation, or else there's real expensive software ($800+). There are 10 videos in this series. Here's the first one.

As for outputting halftones from AI, most people use RIP (Raster Image Processing) software ($500+). In Illustrator, you set your spot colors to overprint in the Attributes panel if you want your inks to overlap. Sometimes I'll set an inside stroke to overprint to create trapping, or a slight overlap between colors. Don't forget your registration marks! This is all stuff that is at the discretion of the printer. You set your angles, DPI, and dot shape in the print menu, send it to the RIP program, and Bob's your uncle. It does the rest for you, producing sharp edged halftones, not pixelly ones like you get in the bitmap method in PS. It probably doesn't really matter that much unless you're doing 100+ DPI, like in offset printing or newspapers. I believe Woot just brings AI files into PS to make halftones anyway. And those PS generated halftones end up printing great - something which I had a hard time believing when I first got here.

What does all this mean? Screen printing is complicated. Woot may have rejected this and the other based on technical difficulty. It would be really nice if the Rejectionator would give a little more detail instead of all this conjecture and pictures with circles and arrows on the back of each one.

j5

bluetuba

Cookie monster gets used alot, but I like your take on it and it's timing for Halloween. It's funny and looks very good.

I love the video and would love to see more of those from the artists. I think it's interesting that you had the main portion done and then spent more than half of the total time on details and polish.

Lacking that polish is I think, one of the many differences between winners and losers here.

"You can't just dress a Minion like Spock, and add a caption that says "Logical Me". There's a prison for people like that. Below my house."

deborah11565

orabbit wrote:Thanks, Merseine and Deborah. Can anyone give me feedback as to what could be improved? I'm playing on the idea that Cthulhu comes to people in dreams, and that Big Bird has an "imaginary" friend. Is it clear that Big Bird is dreaming, or does he look dead? I'm not sure exactly how better to visually suggest dreaming. I could flesh out the rest of Big Bird, but I tried to keep it vague enough to avoid copyright issues. Thanks for any suggestions!

flattopfrank

orabbit wrote:Thanks, Merseine and Deborah. Can anyone give me feedback as to what could be improved? I'm playing on the idea that Cthulhu comes to people in dreams, and that Big Bird has an "imaginary" friend. Is it clear that Big Bird is dreaming, or does he look dead? I'm not sure exactly how better to visually suggest dreaming. I could flesh out the rest of Big Bird, but I tried to keep it vague enough to avoid copyright issues. Thanks for any suggestions!

-Struggling Artist

Let me see if i can explain this where you can understand it. Do you remember back on the old TV shows when someone or something would fade out into a dream sequence and the image would have that blurry wavey kinda thing going on. Maybe if you could fade out and do the wave thing to the bottom part of Snuffthulu it might help. That's the only thing I can come up with besides puttin some "ZZZ's" by Big Birds head and that will not work for this derby... GMV

oakenspirit

bluetuba wrote:I like the idea, but not the cartoon animals. I almost feel like making the trees themselves the victims here and staying within the style of the background and human would be more effective.

Woot.com is operated by Woot Services LLC.
Products on Woot.com are sold by Woot, Inc., other than items on Wine.Woot which are sold by the seller specified on the product detail page.
Product narratives are for entertainment purposes and frequently employ
literary point of view;
the narratives do not express Woot's editorial opinion.
Aside from literary abuse, your use of this site also subjects you to Woot's
terms of use
and
privacy policy.
Woot may designate a user comment as a Quality Post, but that doesn't mean we agree with or guarantee anything said or linked to in that post.